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ABR Arts Performing Arts
It is hard to believe that an organisation founded forty years ago could still be flourishing today under the helm of its original founder. When current creative director Martin Jackson, in 1982, conceived the idea of a co-operative aimed at fostering the development of jazz and improvised music in Melbourne, I doubt he could have foreseen where it might lead. But here we are, four decades on, part of a full house at the Melbourne Recital Centre, here to celebrate the numerous achievements of the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative (MJC).
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First things first, the audience loved it. As Julia Gillard, in a performance that blended naturalism and impersonation, Justine Clarke held the crowd in the palm of her hand. They swooned and sighed to the wholesome depiction of Gillard’s working-class Welsh parents and cackled at the pleasurable jokes made at the expense of Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham, and John Howard.
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The notion of the sad clown probably has its origins in prehistory; the mockery of pain and sorrow is such an embedded human trait that indigenous cultures around the world embraced it long before it became a trope of commedia dell’arte. Pierrot, with his iconic painted white face ...
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The streets of Hobart are especially cold and quiet on the longest night of the year. Those out and about are simply commuting from place to place, wrapped in scarves, hats, and jackets. Some head towards St David's Cathedral to attend Heart of Darkness, the penultimate performance of ...
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As a not-quite-indefatigable cultural itinerant, my memories of Perth are all of festival time. Usually, my arrival is the signal for the temperature to leap into the mid-forties, imbuing the experience with a patina of sweat and a dose of climatic paranoia. PIAF 2016, artistic director Wendy ...
... (read more)You don’t have to be an avid David Bowie fan to be impressed by the breadth and detail of David Bowie Is, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. Imported from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where it was their most successful show to date, it examines the fifty-year career of one of the most suc ...
For two non-indigenous artists to take a story that has deep meaning for an indigenous community and turn it into a dramatic cantata is an exploit fraught with danger. Australian culture is littered with attempts by white artists to incorporate indigenous themes into their works; works which have foundered due to their authors’ patronising assumption that they can ...
When Brecht wrote The Good Person of Szechuan (1939–42), he had been influenced by the colour and brashness of Chinese theatre, whose archetypal heroes and villains underpinned his concept of the Alienation Effect. Brecht, ever the political theorist, wasn’t interested in characters with whom the audience empathised, or of employing Stanislavski-based a ...
Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall has now been dramatised, along with its sequel, Bring up the Bodies. Brian McFarlane, a regular ABR film and theatre critic, caught the new Royal Shakespeare Company production in London.
If, like me, you were not a fan of Hilary Mantel’s historical doorstops, Wolf Hall (2009) ...
Goats are all but ubiquitous in the work of Patrick White. Start looking for them and they appear everywhere, staring out, page after page, with wise, tranquil eyes, pellets scattering like secrets into dust.
White bred goats, of course, Saanen goats, or tried to, while living at Castle Hill, and it is clear that the goat-mind made a profound impression. ‘ ...